Daily I look into my daughter's eyes and get lost. They're just the most amazingly detailed brown eyes I've ever seen.

Today (after having been sick for almost 3 weeks) I picked up my camera when the kids played outside in the snow. When I saw this one on the LCD I was excited to check it out on the computer screen as well. It's my new favorite.

"Kate, look into the camera please." Results in a strange contortion of a pose usually. Funny.

Imagination is big in our house right now. Four year olds don't have a clear line of demarcation between real and unreal, so we've been working on understanding more of that. It's hard to figure out if stories about school really happened or if they were perhaps made up or slightly altered. Kate kept talking about a little boy named Christian who said all sorts of not very nice things to her. Christian, it turns out, hadn't been at the school for over 7 weeks!

Her brothers will tell her she is a liar when she tells them something they know not to be entirely true. Liar is such a negative word, and I've asked them not to use it anymore and explained to them that this is a stage in a child's development where she's still learning what is real for everyone and what is real for just her.

We don't call it lies. We call it imagination. She plays imagining quite a bit. While I'm typing this she asked me if she could imagine she's a mommy. Of course she can, imagining is always fine, and she doesn't have to ask me.

Kate has imaginary dogs, imaginary dinosaurs and she loves to imagine that all her toys are real.She re-enacts and imagines episodes from her favorite tv shows. It happens while she's watching and it happens after the fact, when she rearranges the stories to fit her own ideas. She uses any toy that she can find to match the personalities. Right now she's playing with Olivia and a random cat and dog. (Kate: "Mom, do you mind if we imagine this Olivia's house? You don't have to be a pig, no one has to be a pig, she just lives here.")

Gosh, I love this. In all my years of yearning to be a mom, I didn't know how cool it can be when your kid takes you on a journey in her imagination.

She watches more tv than I thought I'd let her before I became her mom! It serves to fuel her imagination though, that makes it less bad, right? (Note the tv reflection in her eyes in the photo below!)

It sort of has me down this year.

I used to like winters. The mild winters of the Netherlands with lots of rain didn't get me down. The short winters in Albuquerque were short enough to be fun and over before you knew it. Living in Illinois, where winter is mostly a dreary and messy affair has done me in.

I've been wanting to blog. Looking back I can't believe I didn't even blog Kate's birthday last year. It was a fabulous birthday (she's still talking about it) and it deserves a post. After all, this blog is partly supposed to be in lieu of albums and scrap books. A web album and posts of Facebook just won't cut it! There are lots of twitter updates regarding Kate, but those don't really count.

One post per week ... as a journal. That shouldn't be too much, should it? I have some photography projects in mind too, that need to get out of the mind and onto the sensor and the computer! To get me started I modified my blog design and added website pages to match.

I Heart Faces is in my reader, so I usually take a quick peek when the new photo challenge is posted.

This time I have the photo all ready. It's our newest family member Chloe. In this photo she's 10 weeks old. She's a lovely terror in our home. She thinks our 4 year old daughter's ankles are perfect for chasing (we're working on that) and totally has thrown our 5 year old Beagle's life upside down. We were hoping that Peanut would become a bit more active with a baby sis.

Chloe is a blue beagle. Her color is almost faded compared to a regular beagle.

Visit I Heart Faces to see more pet entries.

Dinosaurs, one of Kate's favorite subjects. As I'm typing this she's sitting next to me, playing a dinosaur game on the computer while wearing a dinosaur t-shirt from the Field Museum.

She has a LOT of dinosaurs and animals (as shown in the second photo of this post. They need a landscape. We did one awhile ago, but it got ripped. Regular art paper didn't really stand up to frequent trampling by dinosaurs and more current animals. She made a new one with her brother Danny, that got peed on by the dog (oops).

We used heavy duty water color board this time, which I later covered with duralar so it'll last longer.

It's a fun art project that we did together. She's painted some landscapes since then. I love how she still uses the entire piece of paper, even when it's really big.